I’ll be him when I come back, not even looking up as I walk back into his house and back up to his son. I’ll be him, not hearing the screams that night. I’ll open my eyes and wonder. Do I haunt his dreams? Does he hear me? See me?

He, the one who betrayed me, is not smiling.
He merely has that same, blank stare.
With no smile at all.

even then the food seemed to glare at me
but I’d reluctantly swallow
what tasted like shame and sawdust

Into stone they turn and she is surrounded
by reminders and the self-pity compounded

Why do all the lively conversations in the restaurant seem to disappear when I see a man gently touch his wife’s back to guide her out of the restaurant? 

Before we met, I’d play my guitar on the street for spare change, but Tom made things easy. Every night, he came home with a bottle of tequila and a case of beer. My guitar sat in the corner of his bedroom, collecting dust.

My uncle made me think about the fact that many of us are walking around with unhealed wounds, things we don’t talk about, things we let eat away at us, things we let simmer and fester and never boil over. How we sometimes hold stuff in until it destroys us. 

never have i ever driven by your house at 2 a.m. drunk and high hoping you’d catch me, and i certainly never called you drunk wanting you to sing me a lullaby.

at dawn, the sky goes coral, / like your lips, / and i wanna kiss / kiss kiss / it purple again.

We fell apart in this life and the last.
We fell apart in every life before this one
that we almost shared together.

But I am a weak little traitor for them
I make a sacrifice
Of my identity, of my comfort, of my earned self

There is the mattress where my heart broke, each spring weighed down with the memories of a girl with nothing left to give, asking a boy with nothing left to take how to make him stay.

But rage is a volatile cocktail.  Unlike its alcoholic counterpart, rage leaves no bread-crumb trail of escalating inebriation, no spiking arc of getting snockered—no warning, in other words, to hide or get out of the way.  It erupts in a split-second, an adrenaline shot that screams and smashes things, big wide swathes of arms swinging in anger, connecting often. 

i wonder what his liver looks like
under a microscope
i hope i never find out

Gazing into her placid forehead,
I know she never fell in love
with a drug addict, never
subsisted on lentils and rice.

And I forgot his name, but not his
Thin build, his love of the macho Hem,
And that he drove to Flagstaff, four hours
Away to die parked in the forest.

A house divided against itself won’t prosper.
If I’m divided I’m conquered, right?

I am filled with dread every time I call that this might be the time I hear "the number you have dialed has not been recognised" and every time I get through to the voicemail, I begin my recording with a sigh of relief. It’s not logical, this voicemail obsession. No one can hear them, more specifically she cannot hear them.

In the reality of our pandemic, relatives are left to fret between updates from the hospital. They are not allowed to visit. I cannot connect to my patients; the protective masks we wear reduce the healthcare providers to a uniform. I cannot smile. I am not a reassuring face, but a fogged set of goggles.

Maybe a morbid and narcissistic part of me thought I might achieve posthumous success as a writer. We love consuming dead people’s art, especially if the artist committed suicide. These dead lines of prose might have more value if their author was dead too.